The Fragility of Things - William E. Connolly

Mal7

Dagobah Resident
The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism
By William E. Connolly. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

I have been reading this book today and finding it interesting, but also a little hard to summarize. It is rather densely written, stylistically somewhat like Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.
The book is in part an attack on Neoliberalism, as formulated by Friedrich von Hayek, and also as it exists today in the USA and among the corporate multi-nationals. Since the time when von Hayek was writing, Connolly notes that Neoliberalism's place in the political spectrum has now found some overlap with right wing evangelical Christianity, forming what he calls an “Evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine”.

One of Connolly’s criticisms of neoliberalism is that although markets are a self-organising system, they are but one of many such systems that can be found at different levels, from viruses, and the two pounds of bacteria that cohabit an adult human’s body, to earthquakes, climate change and cosmic forces. These other levels are interacting with human economic systems, and hence neoliberal theory is taken to show considerable hubris by considering the market as the only system of causative importance.

The book begins with an account of the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755. Voltaire’s characters in Candide finished up at the scene of this earthquake, and Voltaire used them to ridicule the idea that everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds. By claiming that each successive disaster was really for the ultimate good, Voltaire was ridiculing the idea of a divine providence behind all things

Connolly tries to put forward an “ontocosmology” that is on the one hand neither reduced to pure efficient causation, with later events completely determined by preceding causes, and on the other hand not a world created by a deity that unfolds like clockwork to one final destination. He sees creativity as being a property of self-organising systems that can create new functions and purposes for things in a non-entropic way, and also in a way that is not wholly predictable on the level of material causation.

Here are a few quotes from the book:
I believe the human estate is both imbricated with and periodically overmatched by a cosmos composed of multiple, interacting force fields moving at different speeds. We are today at least as closely implicated in several nonhuman force fields as the city of Lisbon found itself to be with that earthquake, tsunami, and fire. In a world more scientifically and technically advanced, we are not that much better equipped culturally, philosophically, politically or spiritually to address these entanglements.
- Page 7.
There are simple and complex versions of self-organization, as we shall see. The most complex version is perhaps best described as having a “teleo-dynamic” element in it: it exceeds blind causality without being tethered either to simple intentionalism or to ontological finalism. A cosmos composed of innumerable, interacting temporal force fields with varying degrees of self-organization capacity subtracts from it both finalism and the sufficiency of blind, efficient cause. The sufficiency of simple intentionality bites the dust too. There are efficient causes, but they do not suffice to explain the most critical events. This is because in some of these events a creative result emerges out of the conjunctions between blindness and self-organizational processes.
- Page 8.
The point now, however, is not to examine closely what must be done in each of these zones. It is to foment appreciation of the innumerable links among markets, states, hegemonic ideologies, cultural movements and nonhuman force fields with variable powers of self-organization. It is to enact a new ethos of economic life close to the cosmic sensitivity of Sophocles than to that of theorists, philosophers, talking heads, preachers, financial experts, and citizens who insulate extant images of social life from volatile, interacting force fields with which they are imbricated. Check out those implacable plagues the next time you read the wise Sophocles.
- Page 36.
The existential forces of hubris (expressed above all in those confident drives to mastery conveyed by military elites, financial economists, financial elites, and CEOs) and of ressentiment (expressed in some sectors of secularism and evangelicalism) now play roles of importance in the shape of consumption practices, investment portfolios, worker routines, managerial demands, and the uneven senses of entitlement that constitute neoliberalism.
- Page 39.
The emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism slinks as a dangerous possibility on the horizon, partly because of the expansion and intensification of capital, partly because of the real fragility of things, partly because the identity needs of many facing these pressures encourage them to cling more intensely to a neoliberal imaginary as its bankruptcy becomes increasingly apparent, partly because so many in America insist upon retaining the special world entitlements the country achieved after World War II in a world decreasingly favorable to them, partly because of the crisis tendencies inherent in neoliberal capitalism, and partly because so many resist living evidence around and in them that challenges a couple of secular and theistic images of the cosmos now folded into the institutional life of capitalism.
- Pages 39-40.
[Terrence] Deacon’s theory of evolution is designed to fill a gap in the reductionist, genocentric readings of neo-Darwinism rather than to summarize an account that is already confirmed. But that situation holds true for neo-Darwinism too, since it has difficulty explaining how mutations become converted into new organic developments before selection sets in. And because, too, it tends to limit the process of selection to the issue of survival. If you find plausible Deacon’s account of teleodynamics and the modes of self-organization it makes possible, as I do, a set of questions still remains: How did the transition from nonlife to life occur? [. . .] Does it makes sense to speak of vague searches within organisms without reference to consciousness, as this biological theory does? To what extent is the history of species evolution bound up with intersections between shifts in the environment, drives to persistence, and learning processes growing out of organic searching mechanisms amid incompleteness? Do other systems besides organisms, the biosphere, and ecosystems exhibit self-organizing capacities with enough power to defer the tendency to entropy apparently folded into the universe?
To Deacon, “information” involves a dicey exchange between (sometimes new) cloudy signs and (sometimes emerging) capacities of an organism to receive and absorb part of that noise as a sign. He thus rejects a notion of information that reduces it to a code resulting in a passive mode of replication.
[The Terrence Deacon reference is to Deacon's book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter NY: W. W. Norton, 2012]
- Pages 87-88.
If you combine these five points you can see that the cosmos to which Hesiod is profoundly attached is neither deeply providential nor receptive to consummate human knowledge and mastery, even if it does become a bit more tidy with the Olympians. It thus did not take all much for Sophocles to transfer this myth into a tragic vision, as Athens confronted its own conflicts between old and new gods. Conflicts, surprising turns, and unexpected events periodically punctuate the regularities of civil life, steady tradition, and ethical precept, creating new issues for decision and judgment. The result is not “chaos,” as some devotees of a straitjacket image of order love to say whenever they encounter a vision identifying a whiff of volatility in the very essence of order; rather the world consists of durable periods of relative order punctuated by periods of disruption and significant change in this or that zone, due in part to conjunctions between conflicting human agencies and between them and nonhuman forces.
I said “gods or force.” As Jeanne Pierre Vernant has shown, Ionian philosophers such as Anaximander and Democritus did not have to work hard to translate these intermingling and contending gods into multiple forces.
- Pages 101-102.
Ethical cultivation, then, is crucial to the practice of practical wisdom. But it does not suffice. It is one element among others needed to come to terms with the ways of a world of becoming. A world of becoming is replete with multiple forces that sometimes intersect to throw something new into the world. So strategic events (including relatively extended periods) periodically arrive when it is pertinent to dwell in an exploratory way in the gap between the disturbance of an emerging situation and those prior investments of habit, passion, faith, identity, progress, and political priority you bring to it. In the Greek tradition those who specialized in similar activities were called seers; in the religions of the Book they are often called mystics or prophets. [. . .] We do not listen to gods who exceed our knowledge, limited as it it. We allow multiple pressures and concerns to reverberate through us as new tipping points arise in the hope that a new, untimely idea, theme, or strategy will emerge for further exploration.
- Page 134.
To probe differences in sensibilities is to see how the right-wing media today does not simply manipulate its target audience, driving that audience to contradict its self-interest. Self-interest is more complex than that. Rather a resonance machine is forged between a will to believe among the primary audience and the media messages relayed to it. That is why factual correction is often insufficient to counter the emanations from such a machine. The best hope is to mobilize a counterconstituency as you also tap into subordinate strains of sensibility among those on edge of that machine, seeking to draw out more noble tendencies as you correct misstatements of fact. Such a combination is not always easy to enact. That is one reason we live during a dangerous time.
- Page 180.
 
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